Tag Archives: Knowledge

My atheism derived from my observation of reality,
since the accuracy of observation cannot be proven,
conviction in my understanding of reality is therefore an exercise in faith.
Thus, my atheism is ultimately faith based,
as with almost all forms of knowledge,
except for the existence of self.
(hat tip: René Descartes for “cogito ergo sum“, and Monicks for my muse.)

Having decided that i didn’t want to pursuit a career in academia sometime after (!) i entered the PhD program. My only remaining interest in doing a PhD, is the pursuit of knowledge. Which is not exactly what PhD is about.

PhD is great if its ok for you to spend 4 or more years of your life doing independent research to make a tiny dent in the knowledge frontier. However, like me, if you are just want to consume knowledge in general, you should just read what has already been written. There are plenty out there, and knowledge are dirt cheap now a days. So, I ended up spending about 2/3 of my time, reading things that does not contribute to my thesis. So in 2006, roughly 3 years after entering a PhD program at age 23 in 2003, i decided to discontinue. And that is my story, there are many others.

This is good news for the world’s poorest countries who’s limited access to knowledge has hampered their development effort. As demonstrated by the catch-up development of all countries that industrialized after the Second World War, foreign knowledge is not an advantage, its is an absolute necessity.

Currently Google’s endeavor is being delayed by book copyright holder’s protest on the bases that Google’s storage of their copyright protected books is a violation of their rights. Even though Google’s plan for protected books is to “displays only a snippet of several lines of text, plus bibliographic information and, if the book is still in print, giving links to where it might be available for purchase” according to New York Times. Google is in effect offering free publicity for these publishers. Why are they still complaining? According to one the publishers they are not happy because they will not be able to share the revenue gain from advertisement Google display with the search results of copyright protected material.